The Nature of Emotions

What is an emotion? More than 90 definitions have been offered over the past century, and there are almost as many theories of emotion—not to mention a complex array of overlapping words in our languages to describe them. Plutchik offers an integrative theory based on evolutionary principles. Emotions are adaptive—in fact, they have a complexity born of a long evolutionary history—and although we conceive of emotions as feeling states, Robert Plutchik says the feeling state is part of a process involving both cognition and behavior and containing several feedback loops.